Film Seeks Dallas` Help Recreating Jfk Killing

March 05, 1991|By Paul Weingarten, Chicago Tribune.

DALLAS — If all goes as movie director Oliver Stone has planned, the familiar motorcade will again pass by the infamous Texas School Book Depository, where a sniper will crouch at a sixth-floor window and fire at the president.

But while Dallas County officials are eager to encourage lucrative filmmaking ventures, they are not sure they want to help the director, famous for his wrenching visual style, to recreate the blackest day in Dallas history and disturb what some consider a local shrine.

The Dallas County Commissioners Court is to vote Tuesday on the filmmaker`s proposal to temporarily move the former book depository`s widely acclaimed sixth-floor museum and to restore the building and surrounding property to its appearance on Nov. 22, 1963, the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Except for the sixth-floor museum, the building is now county office headquarters.

Two of the five commissioners say they are opposed to any filming on the site. They contend it would disrupt the museum and the county`s business, and would interfere with the thousands of tourists who flock to Dallas` most sensitive historical landmark every week. Officials also maintain that the site should remain free of any hint of commercial exploitation.

Two commissioners support the project because they say filmmaking boosts the local economy. The fifth commissioner says he is undecided.

The movie`s script remains a secret, but Stone has said Kevin Costner will star as New Orleans prosecutor Jim Garrison, who claimed Kennedy was the victim of an FBI and CIA conspiracy and that Lee Harvey Oswald, identified by a presidential commission as the lone assassin, was set up to take the blame. In one way or another, the assassination is never far from headlines in Dallas. Last fall, an unemployed oil equipment salesman from Midland called a press conference to claim that his father, a former Dallas police officer, shot the president from a grassy knoll near the book depository.

Then, in a bruising court battle, Jack Ruby`s brother, Earl, wrested control of his late brother`s estate, including the gun that shot Oswald, from lawyer Jules Mayer.

And now, Stone`s proposal. What seems most ironic is that after years of efforts by some Dallas leaders to raze the depository as an unpleasant reminder of the past, the site has now been embraced by some as sacred and not to be sullied by commercial ventures.

``It would be unbecoming for us to sell access to this building,`` said County Judge Lee Jackson, a commissioner. ``It has nothing to do with the desirability of Oliver Stone`s film. Filming inside this building will greatly disrupt the museum . . . and create a circus environment in and around our building that is totally contradictory to the atmosphere we want for a major historical exhibit.``

But for others, the film`s content is the issue. ``Some of us are worried about going along with a movie that might be . . . sensational,`` said Glenn Linden, a history professor at Southern Methodist University and a member of the Dallas County Historical Foundation, which runs the museum.

``We`re worried about the splattering of blood, or something like that,`` he said, adding that the museum had taken pains to present a ``balanced`` view of the assassination and had avoided showing the gorier aspects of it.

One of the producers, Clayton Townsend, accuses the commissioners of trying to censor the movie, which is to begin filming in April.

``People have a real sensitive reaction to this subject,`` Townsend said. ``I think they would like this film to go away, maybe because they`re fearful that we`ll do something that is contrary to the (sixth floor)

exhibit.``

Some of the original requests to restore the site to its 1963 look already have been shelved or scaled back, Townsend said. But the producers still are asking to make a series of changes that include restoring the window frames of the building to their original gray color, installing the original venetian blinds and decorative concrete block on ground floor windows, and building a shed, fences and railroad tracks near the grassy knoll.

The producers have proposed three different shooting schedules. One would require them to move the entire sixth-floor exhibit to another location so they could film there for 3 1/2 weeks. The others are less ambitious and would not require moving the exhibit.

``It would be an incredible dilution of the facts,`` Townsend said, if the moviemakers are denied permission to use the building.